This final entry in the History of Human Space Exploration mini-series by Ben Evans continues with an in-depth look at the latter part of the 20th century and the start of the new millennium. Picking up where Partnership in Space left off, the story commemorating the evolution of manned space exploration unfolds in further detail. More than fifty years after Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering journey into space, Evans extends his overview of how that momentous voyage continued through the decades which followed.

The Twenty-first Century in Space, the sixth book in the series, explores how the fledgling partnership between the United States and Russia in the 1990s gradually bore fruit and laid the groundwork for today’s International Space Station. The narrative follows the convergence of the Shuttle and Mir programs, together with standalone missions, including servicing the Hubble Space Telescope, many of whose technical and human lessons enabled the first efforts to build the ISS in orbit. The book also looks to the future of developments in the 21st century.

“Evans … provides a full biographical background, often with a number of personal anecdotes, on all major (and many minor) participants in the history. … It will serve as a standard reference work for students and the aerospace community. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals/practitioners.” (A. M. Strauss, Choice, Vol. 52 (11), July, 2015)

Ben Evans is an accomplished and experienced space writer ideally qualified to chronicle the epic story of human space exploration. This is the final entry in his "A History of Human Space Exploration" sub-series with Springer Praxis, following after Escaping the Bonds of Earth: The Fifties and Sixties (2009), Foothold in the Heavens: The Seventies (2010), At Home in Space: The Late Seventies into the Eighties (2010), Tragedy and Triumph: The Eighties and Early Nineties (2012), and Partnership in Space: The Mid to Late Nineties (2014). He has also published numerous space and astronomy related articles in such journals as Spaceflight, Countdown and Astronomy Now.